A 1992 Retrospective : Either through action or sloth, through selfless gestures or selfish excess, some people in L.A. set themselves apart. The Times pays tribute to some of these citizens and groups

And The Winners Are. . .

1992 CITY OF ANGELS AWARDS Long Beach Little League, for winning the Little League World Series title after a Filipino team was found to have cheated.

Oscar De La Hoya, the boxer from Los Angeles' Eastside, for fulfilling a promise he made to his dying mother: winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

Ric Munoz, a 34-year-old West Hollywood legal secretary and marathon runner, for completing his 50th marathon despite being infected with the AIDS virus.

Cristal Anguiano, a 12-year-old girl from South-Central Los Angeles, for carrying her brother Rafael to safety after an errant bullet from a gang shootout struck her in the heart.

Sixto Perez, a 12-year-old boy from La Puente, for refusing to sell drugs, even when he was offered $100.

Lorna Hawkins, a Lynwood woman who has lost two sons to gang gunfire, for channeling her grief to create a forum for other families touched by gang violence: a public access TV program called "Drive-By Agony."

Leslie Fritz, a legal secretary from Culver City, for on her own initiative feeding and clothing many of the homeless men who live in tarpaulin and cardboard shanties near the Temple Street off-ramp downtown.

Stephen J. Murphy, an investment company owner and former homeless Vietnam veteran, for saving a group of homeless veterans from eviction by buying the $390,000 home they were using as a halfway house and donating it to a nonprofit rehabilitation program.

The Los Angeles Department of Public Works' 70 pothole patchers, for filling in 200,000 holes a year on 7,500 miles of streets and alleys.

Terri Barnett, Bobby Green, T.J. Murphy and Lei Yuille, four strangers, for emerging from the crowd at Florence and Normandie avenues to save trucker Reginald O. Denny from being beaten to death by driving his unwieldy 18-wheeler to safety.

Gregory Alan Williams, an actor, and John Mitchell, a Los Angeles Times reporter, for rescuing a Japanese-American man and a Vietnamese-American woman who were beaten in the early hours of the riots.

Bennie Newton, a minister, for risking his life to save Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan father of three who was dragged from his truck and beaten during the first night of rioting.

Radio Korea and Radio Fiesta, two foreign-language AM radio stations, for serving as lifelines during the riots to communities whose needs were not met by English-language media.

Deborah Atwater, a Carson mother of two, for reacting to the riots by creating an inspirational piece of jewelry--the "unity bracelet"--out of yellow, red, black, brown and white beads.

Shirley Jaffe, a wealthy Beverly Hills resident, for celebrating her 50th birthday in South-Central Los Angeles, where she staged a benefit for the Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center, an after-school program.

Nicholas Clapp and George R. Hedges, a Los Angeles filmmaker and a lawyer, for leading the team that braved sandstorms and camel spiders to discover the fabled Arabian city of Ubar, the long-lost "Queen of the Frankincense Trade."

Rudolph A. Marcus, a Caltech professor, for helping explain how living things store energy--an achievement that won him the 1992 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Sharon Long, Stephen Schneider, Evelyn Fox Keller, Geerat Vermeij and Amalia Mesa-Bains--two Stanford University professors, two UC scholars and a San Francisco artist--for each winning an eclectic "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation.

1992 FALLEN ANGELS AWARDS Patrick E. Keller, Hawthorne's former city clerk, who moved to Hawaii but continued collecting his $600-a-month paycheck for at least a year before being discovered.

James D. Bisetti, a top employee of the Department of General Services, for improperly authorizing up to $88,000 in overtime pay for himself.

Sergio Hernandez, a 1989 lottery winner who receives payments of $120,000 a year, for using his Pico Rivera home to store loot--including five vacuum cleaners--that was stolen during the riots.

Rebuild L.A. czar Peter V. Ueberroth, for claiming that 68 companies had committed to invest heavily in Los Angeles' inner city, when only 49 had agreed to do so.

Former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley, for not talking to each other for the 13 months before the riots.

Gov. Pete Wilson and Willie Brown, for the snail-like pace with which they resolved the state budget crisis.

Millionaire actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for forgiving a $22,000 debt owed to him by a struggling widow only after news reports revealed that his lawyers had placed a lien against her home.

Stephen Herman, the inventor of an unproven AIDS drug called Viroxan, for injecting the substance into patients without government permission or reliable evidence that it is safe or effective.

Phi Kappa Psi and Theta Xi, two UCLA fraternities, for publishing sexually explicit, racist and homophobic songbooks that celebrate mutilation, cannibalism, necrophilia and sadism--such as using a cheese grater to mutilate women's breasts.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for violating its own policy to seek competitive bids when it awarded $6 million in computer-related contracts to a research firm with close ties to several former district officials.

L.A. City Councilman and mayoral candidate Mike Woo, for proposing strict hillside development restrictions that his newly renovated hillside home does not meet.

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors, for taking their county-owned, armor-plated cars on personal trips--to the barber, the doctor, even on vacation--and paying no taxes on the benefit.

The L.A. County Transportation Commission, for spending $2.9 million on travel, meals, entertainment and automobile expenses over an 18-month period.

The L.A. County parking control officer who, while ticketing a Cadillac in Willowbrook, overlooked a body sitting stiffly behind the wheel.

Dennis Palmieri, the former lawyer for one of the suspects in the beating of truck driver Reginald O. Denny, for claiming on his resume that his ideas helped lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the Iron Curtain.

The National Rifle Assn., for using photos of the L.A. riots in its advertisements to attract new members.

Paramount Pictures, for perching a scantily-clad, 75-foot-tall cartoon character named Holli Would atop the Hollywood sign to promote a movie.

Gary Familian, a Santa Monica businessman and former National Father's Day Assn. father of the year, for failing to make child support payments.

U.S. Customs, for detaining 2,000 stuffed teddy bears at the Los Angeles International Airport, delaying their arrival in Iraq, where they were distributed to sick Iraqi children.

Former California Coastal Commissioner Mark L. Nathanson, who, while awaiting trial on seven counts of political corruption, failed five times to make a weekly check-in call to the federal court in Sacramento.